Three Seconds

up and taken to Österåker in a separate vehicle.
    __________
    Piet Hoffmann had never been inside the walls of Aspsås prison before. He had mapped out all the buildings from the church tower and had studied the bars in front of every window, and while on remand, with Erik’s help, he had learnt about the prisoners and staff in all the corridors of Block G, but when both iron gates opened and the bus headed towards the central security, it was the first time that he had actually been inside one of the country’s top security prisons. It was hard to move with the tight, heavy leg irons on, each step was too short and the sharp metal cut into his skin. Two screws right behind him and two just as close in front when they pointed to the door to the left of the normal visitors’ door, the one that went straight into registration and more screws from security. They undid the restraints and he could move his arms and legs freely while he was naked and bent over double, with a rubber-gloved hand checking up his arse and another pulling at his hair like a comb and a third feeling around in his armpits.
     
    __________
    He’d been issued with new clothes that hung off him and were just as ugly as the others, and was then escorted to a sterile waiting room where he sat on a wooden chair and didn’t say a word.
     
    Ten days had passed.
    For twenty-three hours of the day he had lain on a bunk behind a metal door with a peephole in from the corridor. Five square metres and no visitors, no newspapers, no TV, no radio. Time to break you and make you compliant.
    He had got used to having someone there. He had forgotten how much loneliness reinforced your longing.
    He missed her so much.
    He wondered what she was doing right now, what she had on, how she smelt, if her steps were long and relaxed, or short and irritated.
    Zofia might not be there for him any more.
    He had told her the truth and she would do with it what she wanted and he was so scared that in a couple of months he would no longer have anyone to miss, he would be nothing.
    __________
    He had been staring at the white walls of the waiting room for four hours when two screws from the day shift opened the door and explained that a cell in G2 Left would be his home at the start of the long sentence. One in front and one behind as they started to walk through a wide passage under the prison yard, a few hundred metres of concrete floor and concrete walls, a locked internal door with a security camera and another passage and then steep stairs up to Block G.
     
    He had left behind the days cooped up in remand at Kronoberg and the fast-track trial, where he did exactly what he told Henryk and the Deputy CEO he would do.
    He had admitted to possession of three kilos of amphetamine in the boot of a rented car.
    He had got the prosecutor to confirm that he was acting alone and was solely responsible for the crime.
    He had declared himself satisfied with the judgement and had signed the document and thereby avoided any unnecessary wait for it to enter into force.
    The following day, here he was walking through one of the passages in Aspsås prison on his way to a cell.
    ‘I’d like to have six books.’
    The warden in front of him stopped.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘I’d like to borrow—’
    ‘I heard what you said. I was just hoping that I’d heard wrong. You’ve only been here a few hours, you’re not even in your unit yet, and you start talking about books.’
    ‘You know it’s my right.’
    ‘We’ll talk about that later.’
    ‘I need them. It’s important to me. Without books I won’t survive this.’
    ‘Later.’
    __________
    You don’t understand.
     
    I’m not here to serve some shitty sentence.
    I’m here to knock out all the drug dealers in your leaky prison in a matter of days and then take over myself.
    Then I’ll carry on working, analysing, putting together the pieces until I know everything I need to know, and with that knowledge I will destroy the Polish organisation’s operations, in the name of the Swedish police.
    I don’t think you’ve understood that.
    __________
    The unit was completely deserted when he arrived, sandwiched between two young and quite nervous screws.
     
    Ten years had passed and it was a completely different prison, but it could well have been the same unit as back then: he was back on the corridor with eight cells on each side, the well equipped kitchen, the TV corner with card games and thoroughly thumbed